It’s not immediately obvious how to install it from a fresh Ubuntu or Linux Mint install, so here goes.

Install Ruby

First off, hub is a Ruby program. So we’ll have to install Ruby. Open up your terminal (Ctrl+Alt+t) and run:

sudo apt-get install ruby

As of time of writing, that installs Ruby 1.8.x.

Download hub

Hub’s suggested path is to create a bin folder in your home directory. I don’t know if this is better than installing into the more standard /usr/bin/, but here goes anyway:

mkdir ~/bin

Now download the hub script:

curl http://defunkt.io/hub/standalone -Lo ~/bin/hub

The hub script file now needs to be made executable:

chmod 755 ~/bin/hub

Note: Linux Mint will automatically find this ~/bin folder next time you log in. So log out and log back in again. Ubuntu may not do this, I don’t know. If it doesn’t, you’ll have to find out how to att the ~/bin folder to your PATH variable.

Now you’re done. Open your terminal, and run:

hub

Easy error formatting

You’ll need to edit out php.ini file for this.

We’ll be following PHP’s Runtime Confirguration instrucitons.

Just set the following variables in php.ini:

error_prepend_string = '<pre>'
error_append_string = '</pre>'

Simple, now the error will be wrapped in HTML PRE tags to have the error formatted. When you’re debugging code, and there’s an error of multiple lines, at least now the error will be shown by default with line breaks.

Thanks to Randall Degges who gave an introduction to tmux.

Splitting your terminal – use a a multiplexer

tmux is what’s called a terminal multiplexer.

tmux is a program you can run in your terminal. It allows you to have multiple terminal “windows” running in the one terminal window in your windows manager.

You can also split each terminal window into several panes.

This is useful if you find yourself opening multiple terminal windows.

I’m a tmux noob, so I still wasn’t sure where to start with tmux, so here’s how I got going.

The secret for using tmux

When running tmux, press Ctrl+b (Linux). And then enter your tmux command.

For a list of commands, check man tmux.

I was confused by man tmux where it referred to C-b. It does explain that this means typing Ctrl+b followed by command you desire.

Ok, let’s get started with tmux

1. Open a terminal window (Ctrl+Alt+t)
2. Type tmux. If the program is not installed, install it. On Debian-based systems you’ll be told how to install it with an apt-get command.
3. Now an instance of tmux is running in your terminal. Notice the coloured toolbar at the bottom of the window which tmux will use to keep you informed.

Using tmux

Split the terminal window into two panes

man tmux tells us that the command " splits the current pane into two, top and bottom.

This means that you first press Ctrl+b, and immediately followed by typing ".

Great. You now have two terminal panes to work in.

From now on I’ll use the standardised C-b notation, which means typing Ctrl+b.

Open the man page in the current pane

Type:

man tmux

Now you have the tmux man page in one pane, and your standard terminal in the other pane. You should be starting to see the usefulness of tmux.

Switching panes

You can’t just use your mouse to click into the pane you want to use.

An easy way to cycle between panes in your current window is:

C-b o

Kill a pane

To kill the current pane:

C-b x

Then type y to confirm.

A task for you:

• Read the man page to find out how to split a pane vertically rather than horizontally.

• Split the window into two panes once again.

Create a new windows

So far, we have been dealing with one tmux window, with multiple panes.

You can also have multiple windows, with multiple panes. I consider a window like a desktop, or a browser tab.

Create a second window:

C-b c

Check the bottom toolbar. You’ll see your two windows (0 and 1) listed.

Rename your window

Make it easier to identify windows by typing:

C-b ,

(Yes, that’s a comma.)

Now type a short name to identify this window.

Switch between windows

No Alt-Tab here!

Press C-b and then the number of the window you want to open.

Try switching between window 1 and 0 and back again:

C-b 0

C-b 1

C-b 0

Cycle to the next window

Type:

C-b n

Or cycle to the previous window:

C-b l

List all keybindings

As the man page tells you, issue this command to quickly review the available keybindings:

Ctrl+b ?

Stuff I still need to learn with tmux

• How to scroll through the history of the current pane. I’m used to being able to scroll up with the mouse wheel. There must be another way to scroll, presumably with a keyboard shortcut.

• Sessions: I know there is functionality to remember the layout of your windows and panes for the next time you run tmux.

• Automatically launching tmux for each new terminal: once I get used to tmux, I guess I’ll want to have it launched automatically (?).

Other terminal multiplexer options

Randall mentions:

If you’ve ever had the need to run multiple terminal windows inside an existing terminal window, you’ve probably heard of GNU screen.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t.

Ok, to be more honest, I had read about screen one week before reading his blog post.

But I had been using Linux for three years before realising you could even split your terminal window.

Summary

Enjoy tmux. Was this quick run-down of help to you? What other commands have you found useful?

Bonus: I enjoyed writing this post in WordPress as Markdown syntax, thanks to the Markdown on Save Improved plugin, although the parser is not perfect.

Edit: Listen to a [Changelog podcast episode](http://thechangelog.com/post/17827235767/episode-0-7-3-tmux-with-brian-hogan-and-josh-clayton) where they discuss using tmux.

SSH config

It’s handy to configure SSH connections.

For example, you can keep all SSH connections alive by default.

Edit ~/.ssh/config and add the following command:

    Host *
        ServerAliveInterval 240

Sync the config between your computers

But you still have to set that config file on your different computers.

Enter Dropbox. Store the config file in Dropbox, and point a symbolic link to it so that SSH on your computer will use that configuration.

1. Create a folder under Dropbox, named .ssh for example.
2. Copy ~/.ssh/config to ~/Dropbox/.ssh/
3. Rename ~/.ssh/config to ~/.ssh/backup.config
4. Make a symbolic link so that your Dropbox config will be found by your SSH:
   `ln -s ~/Dropbox/.ssh/config ~./ssh/config`

Summary

Now you can edit SSH’s config in Dropbox, and it will update on the rest of your machines.

But is there a more intelligent way of doing this?

Clicking that button feels like one little victory against spammers. I love clicking that button.

And so did people on my mailing list. It grew to 3,000 subscribers before it reached a tipping point and had to be abandoned.

The rules to live or die by

Mailchimp monitor “marked as spam” rates for mailing lists.

If more than 0.1% of subscribers mark an email as spam, this rings alarm bells on Mailchimp. Three warnings, and you’re out.

Did you get one spam report from a 1,000-receiver email? You’re already smack bang on the limit. 2 people for an 800-receiver email, now shit is hitting the fan!

My story

Rob Walling makes the highly valuable point that people generally don’t spend upon their first visit to your site. I have top respect for Rob’s approach to online marketing.

My aim was to build up traffic for Bitesize Irish Gaelic, an online collection of Irish language lessons. Subscribers to my mailing list got an ebook on how to learn Irish online.

I had already collected emails on a landing page before Bitesize officially launched in 2010. I emailed the launch announcement to the list of 179 subscribers. 2 abuse complaints later, and I’m at a 1.1% abuse rate, well above the 0.1% allowed.

Ouch.

After some more emails, I emailed out an announcement about a small price increase. 459 recipients, and one marked as spam. Ugh, I’m still treading above Mailchimp’s rate.

Fast forward a bit, and I send an invite to a segment of the list to register for a free live webinar to learn some Irish. The webinar was fun to do, but of 1,479 recipients, 6 marked it as spam. 0.4% abuse rate.

Feck.

Mailchimp asked me to delete the list.

Things to learn from the failure

There’s a lot of factors at play here that I haven’t been able to get in to. For example, subscribers were receiving an autoresponder series while also getting once-off mails. Some people may have received an autoresponder and a mailing in one single day.

The mailing list needs to be split into two: prospects and customers. Thankfully I had already implemented this early on.

The autoresponder series may not have been interesting enough, although in my opinion it was highly-targetted. It may have been too often, or not often enough.

I didn’t collect first names on the subscription page. Perhaps this may have helped to make the emails more personal.

Despite the double opt-in nature of mailing list subscription, it may not have been clear enough that ebook == mailing list.

Last but not least, I certainly can’t skip the fact that the emails themselves may just have been a bad read. I tried to make them personal, and in my opinion were targetted to a very specific niche. Yet people may not have been impressed.

Be warned here, and then go for it!

Despite resulting in a dead list, this has been a great learning experience in the world of Internet marketing.

A major downfall to email marketing is that testing is difficult! Stray on the wrong side of abuse rates, and you have a real chance of causing actual trouble. In other words, it’s hard to learn.

Email marketing is something that needs to be mastered. But it’s too valuable to ignore.

Rodeo Drive, L.A.

I’ve lived in Ireland for most of my life, except for two trips to France for study and work experience.

I live my life with certain prejudices, formed by what I have already experienced. Prejudices, not necessarily negative in any way, are needed to deal with the world. You need to live your life with a certain set of assumptions. It’s always interesting to experience something new that enrichens your pre-existing assumptions. Experience, I guess you’d call it.

The past 48 hours I spent in L.A. with my lovely wife. L.A. was always going to be difficult for me to conceptualise. There isn’t as far as I know, one “main street”.

Back in Limerick city, you walk down O’Connell Street and you get the see Limerick. It’s not the full representation of the city, but it’s the central location where upon seeing it, you can rest assured that you’ve seen the main bit.

But in L.A. I got the feeling that seeing any one part of the city didn’t tick off the “I have now seen L.A.” checkbox.

I guess I came close to that twice though: Hollywood Avenue and Beverly Mall.

L.A. is of course built on top of the movie industry. While being here it struck me just how successful an industry it is. They (whoever “they are) have founded an industry that has become enshrined in the globalised society. Something that comes from thousands of miles away is very much a part of Irish life and popular culture (only matched by Christianity, as far as I can tell!).

Malibu pier, L.A.

Hollywood Avenue is the tacky representation of the industry that seems to be based further up the hills and across in San Fernando valley. It has stars along the sidewalk with names of actors and musicians. I take it you’re meant to trample upon their names?

After the 48 hour mark of our trip, entering Beverly Mall in West Hollywood was finally the feeling of “I have now seen the type of person they get on My Sweet 16″. Girls really were dressed up to impress, as if they were imagining strolling through the Cresent Shopping Centre in Limerick.

The locals seemed to be good fun and quite relaxed. We got talking to one girl up by Griffith Oberservatory (great views of the city) who was walking her dog. Turns out she was in Dublin for two weeks’ acting classes in the Gaeity Theatre. Another guy, Adam, was at a bar in the Farmer’s Market with his girlfriend. He was smoking cigars, and offered that seeing Disneyland would be more fulfilling that cycling along Santa Monica beach. Maybe it is a tough call.

When I talk about the locals I met, I’m talking about the W.A.S.P.s of L.A. The city, while mixed, is certainly segregated along ethnic lines. But segregated is far too strong a word. Rather, there’s a focus of different races depending on their concentration and influence in any particular area.

It’s impressive how going even from block to block along the same road you get Jewish centres, then Korean, then Mexican. The Mexican influence here is obvious, and you hear Spanish spoken a lot.

The Mexican-style food here is delicious. The “City Market”, named in such general terms, is really a bustling market of real Mexican produce and ingredients. Indulging in a couple of margeritas in El Cayote (visited by Harry Bosch, no less) hit the spot along with some taccos, burritos and enchilladas.

Taking the metro from Downtown, it was again mostly people of Mexican origin. The public transport system here is nothing to be sneezed at. A day pass got us from Hollywood Blvd., to Griffith Observatory, across to Universal City, and back down to Beverly Ave. for our margeritas, with a mixture of buss, shuttle bus, and metro.

Taking any sidestreet off the main avenues brings you to the leafy residential areas. It was here that I got the feeling that the residents were perhaps a little fearful, many houses proclaiming that they were protected by “armed response” security companies.

These houses in the ‘flatlands’ must be the poor cousins of those people living in the hills. Everyone is jostling to live on the highest local peak. Nobody is satisfied with their current situation and always have another place to strive towards. This is the same as any city I know of (yes, of my limited experience).

Billboard against the Hollywood hills.

One thing the local residents really surprised me with was their yielding to pedestrians. Walking along the footpath in Ireland, cars will pull across you without a second thought. They will pull out on the footpath right in front of you waiting to turn on the road, making you walk around them. But the drivers in L.A. always seemed to think ahead and let us pass first.

Overall, I think I can say I was pleasantly surprised by the city. The time of year definitely helped (late January), and there was generally a relaxed atmosphere to the place. There’s obviously huge wealth in the area, and my respect for the society here for being able to create that. The Hollywood industry is massive, while being massively fake, tacky, and difficult for me to comprehend. Public transport is effective, and the choice of food is (too) delicious. With so many other places on the list to visit in our lives, it’s difficult to see us planning another trip dedicated to L.A. That being said, it’s been an interesting place to spend time, and I certainly wouldn’t refuse to come back.

A personal letter. Thanks to Shirley on Flickr.

We launched Bitesize Irish Gaelic in August 2010 after toying with the idea in 2008. It’s a site with online Irish Gaelic language lessons, in bitesize chunks.

The idea of “release early, release often” had intrigued me when planning the site. Reading the free Getting Real ebook by 37Signals, the idea was quite straightforward: release a web app as early as possible and get feedback on it. Users will let you know what they think, and you can iteratively improve the app.

We launched Bitesize Irish Gaelic, and guess what, nobody told us what they thought.

The feedback form wasn’t once filled in by either prospects or members, while it was a part of the main navigation.

Meanwhile in mailing list land…

After launching, I came across Rob Walling who wrote Start Small, Stay Small. In the book, he has distilled his knowledge of starting web apps. He’s an advocate both of outsourcing tasks, and of keeping in contact with prospects through a mailing list, two things I haven’t dabbled in much.

Despite all my on-page optimisation since 2002, I had to a certain extent relied on drive-by online sign ups. In other words, I assumed that people complete whatever action (buying a product, becoming a member) on their first visit.

But more often than not, visitors aren’t immediately convinced and they may take a quick mental note to come back. Then, after building familiarity with you and your web app, they are far more likely to sign up.

So, I created two mailing lists: one for prospects and one for members. With Mailchimp, I set up autoresponders. An autoresponder to a mailing list is an email that you pre-write, and the recipient will get it so many days after signing up. I’ll concentrate on the members mailing list here:

• 2 days after signup, you get an autoresponder with “Get to know Bitesize”.
• 6 days after signup, you get “Track your learning progress”.
• 11 days after signup, you get an article on optimizing your learning.

Each autoresponder comes from me, Eoin Bitesize <eoin@bitesizeirishgaelic.com>, and at the end of each autoresponder email I say:

“I’d love to hear how you’re getting on with Bitesize Irish Gaelic. Just reply to this email to let me know”.

People are replying with feedback to these emails

Suddenly, I got people replying to the autoresponders. The members are telling me how they’re getting on, and it’s mostly positive. They tell me their story and how they started the service.

It’s exactly how I needed to get to know them; it’s exactly what a feedback form wasn’t doing.

Why email is probably easier

Familiarity with how email works: Whether it be Gmail, Facebook Mail (ok, I’m jumping ahead on that right now!), or Outlook, people generally know exactly how to reply to an email. They’re already familiar with the interface. They know where the reply button is, and they know generally how email works. When they get your personalised autoresponder, all they have to do is click reply to send you feedback.

Still, there are a couple of drawbacks to soliciting replies from a mailing list:

1. Many mailing list emails come from a “no-reply” email address, so many people don’t expect to be able to reply to an email that looks like it’s automated.
2. There is the question of whether their reply will ever get back to you or will ever be read.

More unknowns with online contact forms: On the other hand, getting people to contact you through a web page is more difficult, I would argue, for several reasons:

1. Visitors can’t tell where the contact form submits to. Will anybody ever read it?
2. Each contact page on the web looks different, leading to lack of familiarity with the steps required.
3. All sites have slightly different ways of linking to the content page.
4. They generally need to type in their name and email before typing any actual feedback.
5. It may take several clicks to submit a contact form if the form is linked to from another page.
6. There may be a CAPTCHA field needed to block spammers.

Unknowns for visitors when presented with an email address on a web page soliciting feedback:

1. If they are using a webmail address, their computer is probably not set up to deal correctly with clicking on an email address.
2. (Power users) If they send from several different email addresses such as for work or personal, which email address will be selected when clicking on the email link?
3. The email address may have some form of “NO-SPAM” embedded into it, requiring the sender to remove those characters, in an effort to avoid spam.
4. The email address may not even be linked to, but rather embedded in an image trying to avoid spammers.

How to use a mailing list to get feedback

1. As Rob Walling advocates, send your mailing list messages from your personal email address. Use your own name in the sender name field. I use Eoin Bitesize <eoin@bitesizeirishgaelic.com>.
2. Use minimal styling for your mailing list messages. Emails full of images mean advertising email spam. Non-styled emails more often come from humans.
3. Ask for feedback! Tell them specifically that they can simply reply to the email to contact you.
4. Sign off with your real name, and give your personal contact details such as your personal email address.

My web site as of around 1999.

During Christmas 1995, I decided to code myself a “personal webpage”. It was a one-page site. Of course, it had “under construction” dividers.

On it, I wrote about myself (as I am doing now). Very selfish. Anyway, part of that was to write some Irish, as it seemed somehow fun to write about myself in two languages.

The time between 1995 and 2002 is a bit of a blur. I remember that I did have a site “Eoin’s Fab Site”, which slowly formed to have a section called “All Things Irish”. That Irish section had a forum in it, probably by the late 1990s.

The problem was, I was just a kid in school. I didn’t have any money, so was doing everything to find free hosting. As each free host disappeared, I would install a new forum all over again.

In 2002, I finally bought a domain name, irishgaelictranslator.com. I made an announcement, and of course told everyone to register again. IrishGaelicTranslator.com Forum (known as IGTF to its regular members) finally had a permanent home to settle down in. (I should have chosen vBulletin in favour of phpBB, but oh well).

8 years on, and the forum has 60,000+ members who have posted, and 700,000+ posts. Today, for example, there have been 30 active threads. It’s not huge, but is nicely active considering its specific niche. Alont the way there were complaints of the original members as the forum grew bigger, as of course, there was less of a community feeling. Nevertheless, it’s still an active community with a very specific focus.

The single-forum forum

IrishGaelicTranslator.com Forum as of 2010.

IrishGaelicTranslator.com Forum was never divided into several forums. It was never referred to as “forums”. There was never doubt of where to post your message. You just posted your question into the forum. A bit of phpBB customisation made sure that you didn’t see a ‘forums index’.

Forums are still obviously very popular across the web. As far as I can tell, they are still the de facto way of setting up an active community. The problem is, most forum software are hard-coded to have multiple forums. The more sub-fora the merrier! Surely not, for any modestly-sized community that has a specific focus.

There are definitely a couple of problems directly related to sub-dividing your community entrance into different forums:

• You don’t know what to post where. The person setting up the web site either created lots of specific forums trying to pre-empt your question, or they’ve divided in to, say, three generic forums that are so general you still don’t know where to post.
• Forums get stagnant. Take Irish Webmasters Forum as an example. It’s a great place to meet fellow Irish webmasters. The downside: it has links to 35 different forums on their forum index. Where the hell should I post my question? When I was browsing a specific sub-forum a few months ago, the last thread was a month old. Despite the site having the perfect audience, asking my question in the forum would probably only been seen by a handful of people.
• Ultimately, it divides your community.  By taking the single-page approach, everyone focuses on one single forum page, everyone sees each request, and everyone knows where to post.

Unless your forum is hugely popular, I think you’re doing people a favour by keeping everything on one page. People skim content and choose what to read and ignore. I do the same with news site: skim the headlines and read what I want. I don’t click into each of their news sections just to see what’s going on in the world.

Reddit is a good example of this. They have a single page of news items. To deal with the many many links that are submitted, you can still choose to drill down into sub-reddits. But for a smaller site, even that step wouldn’t be needed.

I’ve had the single-page forum for 8 years now, and wouldn’t have it any other way. There are other multi-forum sites I have set up since (especially Irishionary.com forums), but that was due to lack of time to customise the software. The trick is that you need time to set up a custom single-page forum.

If you run a community forum, or are a member of one, let me know what you think about the merits of this approach.

2Checkout.com

In developing Bitesize Irish Gaelic (the idea was there for a while, but needed to be polished), I decided to use 2Checkout.com as the processor of recurring payments.

Why them? I’ve been using them since 2002 on Irish-Sayings.com and LearnIrishGaelic.com. No fancy stuff, just a landing page that accepts sale parameters.

Since then, they came out with an Instant Notification System (INS). It basically calls a specified script on your sever whenever an order is placed, or when fraud status changes, if it’s cancelled, or if a recurring payment has billed. Basically, an automated way to know what’s being ordered from you and what needs to be fulfilled. They also provide a backoffice API for looking up customer and order information.

Confusing inconsistencies

2Checkout.com calls a Direct Return immediately after each sale is complete. That notifies my server immediately of a new sale. It’s how I can provide the user with instant access to what they buy. Within the next few seconds (or perhaps up to 5 minutes later), and INS call is also made with further details of the sale.

Two services with some overlapping data.
The direct return is older than INS, and the INS was developed without, it seems, directly matching what already existed. For example, direct return has an order_number parameter, but INS calls it sale_id (same information). Both are promoted services to developers.

Differing information structures.
An INS call is based on the idea of a sale having an invoice and an invoice having invoice items. Great for storing in a database! But guess what, the Direct Return describes product_id, product_id_1, etc. depending on how many items in the sale, and specifies no invoice number. However, INS describes an invoice number with invoice items item_id_1, item_id_2, etc. What a mess.

The INS API doesn’t do what it promises

Two or three months ago, I gave 2Checkout.com a phone call for the first time. I was testing my billing system built on top Direct Return+INS, after learning a lot about their specifications. For some reason, my test purchases were successfully coming in, getting recorded in my database through INS calls, but lacked any information on the recurring sale, contrary to the spec.

For example, the “status of payment” was NULL, the “next bill date” was NULL, and the price for the recurring item was NULL.

Good thing I called them. Turns out that with any PayPal payment (through which I was testing), 2Checkout.com had a bug where it didn’t provide any of this information.

Seriously, if your application depends on 2Checkout.com to keep track of which date each customer has paid up until, it won’t work. Despite the INS specification promising this information, it’s just not supplied.

As of this week, they have confirmed that the bug still exists.

Ways around it

If you’re a programmer, probably you’re thinking, “There’s lots of ways around this bug!“. I agree (and I have already changed my implementation).

The point is, this payment service that processes recurring payments on my behalf can’t even tell me, in line with the documentation, until what date has this customer paid for.

Mario kept me involved for many hours!

Irishionary.com, the collaborative Irish dictionary that I have been building, depends on user involvement. It’s the active users that keep it going. The whole idea behind the site is that the actions of many people are more effective than one person attempting to build a dictionary alone. At least, such a site is what I’m attempting to implement. It’s difficult to get a critical mass of people involved (meaning there’s not enough people currently involved).

To get started on promoting community involvement, I first picked up a copy of Designing for the Social Web by Joshua Porter (creator of ABTests.com). I’ve been searching for best-practice ways in which to promote user involvement in online applications. That’s what Facebook does: they try to maximise your number of clicks, a goal above simple building of traffic numbers.

So how the hell do you get users involved? What’s so sticky about Facebook or Flickr? It seems like it all comes down to human nature, and the question is how to tap into that nature. People are selfish, they want to know what other think about them, and they want to snoop on what their friends are up to. I’ll leave that to Facebook, it’s not the reason for creating an open collaborative Irish dictionary. Instead, I have to create an environment where people see what they’re part of it, that they see what others think about their contributions, and where it’s easy for them to participate.

Reputation

I got a celebration for finishing the level.

One thing I learned is that measuring and reporting behaviour can be used to emphasise wanted behaviour. You can then reward that behaviour. In this view of the world, everything can become a game. Computer games are great at giving you feedback, making you want to continue to earn more and more game points, and getting you to collect stuff. Game mechanics are used by sites like YouTube and eBay to maximise user involvement.

Building on top of this, sites that I use including StackOverflow.com and Reddit.com both allow you to build up a reputation or “karma” based on feedback by other users. StackOverflow.com is basically a questions-and-answers arena for programmers. It’s easy to see which users that are highly active and respected on the site, as they have accumulated a high reputation score. It makes it easier for other users to identify them as ‘trusted’ users. At the same time, I’m certain that the high reputation score of power users serve their own selfish need to be recognised by the community.

Building on this thinking, I implemented a simple reputation system on Irishionary.com. Let’s be honest, I want you to accurately add new words and translations to the dictionary. Once you add a word, it is reviewed and validated by a user with editing permissions (more on that later). If your word is reviewed and validated without needing to be edited, you earn 10 reputation points. A word that is validated after an edit will earn you 5 reputation points.

With this basic reputation system implemented:

1. The person can tell their behaviour has been appreciated and validated by others.
2. By measuring their activity, they have a goal to increase that reputation score.
3. It promotes them to take care in adding accurate complete information.

Once reputation is earned, we can also use it practically! StackOverflow.com uses reputation as a measure for how in touch you are with their community. Based on that, your reputation decides what level of control you have as a member of the community. Once you have amassed lots of reputation, you are given better moderation and editing powers on the site. In effect, earning reputation is a way to become even more involved with the project.

Feed the selfishness

On Mininova, you can say thanks.

Or perhaps narcissism is a better term for it. There’s nothing cynical in this type of self-interest, it’s how we’re designed. For me, Flickr brings me back because of comments on my photos. It’s as simple as that.

On this note, Robert Scoble recommends to make it easy to share success with others. Celebrate the person’s actions publicly.

Mininova.org allows you to say “thanks” to the original contributor. Along the same lines, I wanted people to be able to thanks the original contributor of a word to the dictionary. For any headword in the dictionary, you can click a button to “Say thanks” to the original contributor.

My intention is that the author will be notified in their activity stream whenever someone else thanks them. A “thanks” also earns the author one reputation point (reputation is always earned from others’ feedback). Others will also be notified that the author has been thanked as a result of having added words to the dictionary.

Conclusion

It’s easy to think that today’s social media is a doodle to implement. However, only a tiny number of sites are “sticky” to their users. Social interactivity is neither a silver bullet. It comes down to building a useful focused site that people want to keep coming back to. Simply allowing social interaction is far from enough to build up an active community. Let’s be clear about it: I’m still learning!